Conspiracy or stuff-up? You know the option for which you should always opt. Yet after the excitement and ­confusion of events in the Senate this week, it seemed every one was going for conspiracy.

Clive Palmer
claimed he had been double crossed by the government. The government said it believed it had reached an agreement with the Palmer United Party (PUP) that the party breached at the last minute.

And across the media, the mining billionaire was portrayed as a dangerous threat to good government, if not democracy itself, by leading a move to stop the Coalition repealing Labor’s carbon price.

The Senate rose for the weekend with all seeming very uncertain and alarming, and nothing more so than the fate of the revised amendments being proposed by the PUP on a penalties regime for businesses that takes no prisoners but the intent of which even the party’s representatives seemed unsure.

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Certainly if the sense of anarchy that prevailed in the upper house this week were to continue there would be every reason to be alarmed. All the warnings about Palmer single-handedly controlling the fate of every piece of legislation would seem prescient.

But let’s go back a few steps and consider just what happened and why and, as a result, what it might say about how things will work in the future.

It’s not as if the Senate has not been full of colourful and unpredictable characters in the past. Those with a slightly longer ­memory may remember when two of the earliest Green senators –
Dee Margetts
and ­
Christabel Chamarette
– set up a pyramid in the Parliament House Mural Hall in 1993 for the purpose of meditating and ­seeking inspiration.

In 2014, we have perhaps got the most diverse Senate crossbench we have ever seen. We have also got a government that has a political language that deals in absolutes.

For example, remember how
Tony Abbott
spoke regularly of how the government’s first actions would be to set up the repeal of the carbon and mining taxes?

There were timetables of meetings with bureaucrats and the like.

Part of that whole push was that the new prime minister announced the new Senate would sit as soon as possible after it came into being on July 1 this year to repeal the carbon and mining taxes. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time: all part of the ‘grown-up government’ ‘patiently and sensibly’ getting on with delivering its mandate.

But you have to wonder whether the seeds of this week’s problems were planted in this very strategy.

“Look in fairness these are new senators," the government’s Senate leader,
Eric Abetz
, observed on Melbourne radio on Friday.

“They’ve only been in the Senate since the first of July. This past sitting week was the first sitting week. I know what it was like for myself and I had the benefit of more seasoned senators to assist me to go through.

“So I’m more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that they have some issues with coming to grips with all the procedures and I don’t want to hold anything against them in that regard."

Exactly. So why, if you were the government, would you not stop and think that the scope for a stuff-up would be fairly high?

Senate virgins

A group of new senators who were not just completely new to the Senate, but in some cases completely new to the workings of federal politics, were thrust in to the complexities of negotiations over complex legislation, let alone coming to terms with the forms and procedures of the upper house.

The PUP senators, for example, did not seem to know that they were able to give instructions to the parliamentary drafters to draw up their amendments. Instead, they handed the amendments to the government to organise the drafting.

You had to also feel extreme sympathy for PUP Senate leader
Glenn Lazarus
, who found himself having to make a call on a discussion about amendments on the floor of the chamber that was confusing even experienced senators, even before he had made his maiden speech. (A tight spot he handled well in the circumstances.)

As far as can be determined, despite the Palmer theatrics, what happened on Thursday was clearly in the category of a series of stuff-ups as much as an attempt to ­undermine democracy.

Palmer had foreshadowed for some time that his party would support the repeal of Labor’s carbon pricing legislation. His only condition was that it had to contain clear rules ensuring that consumers would get back any cost savings from the removal of the carbon price. PUP and the government worked together to develop amendments to that effect, which were circulated to the Senate early in the week.

But as the days went on, concerns started to emerge in the PUP Senate team about whether the amendment went far enough, particularly about whether it would see small business, as well as households, reimbursed for the effect of the tax.

In what may be a sign of just how complex the new Senate may be, some have suggested that the Democratic Labour Party senator John Madigan may have raised the alarm on this issue.

What happened during the course of Wednesday and Thursday remains a subject of contention and confusion.

But early on Thursday, the Palmer forces gathered in their offices at the National Press Club to consider reworked amendments provided by the government.

A crucial issue seems to have been that Palmer wanted the legislation to flatly state that those in breach of the new provisions would be subject to penalties. He redrafted the amendments himself to that effect.

But the Clerk of the Senate, Rosemary Laing, advised this would constitute a money bill – legislation that can only come from the House of Representatives. She is believed to have suggested an alternative which would have made the penalties only enforceable by a court – a change which would have made it possible to proceed.

But the change did not satisfy Palmer.

Meantime, the government had moved a ‘guillotine’ on debate on the legislation, meaning moving that it would only be debated until 11.50 on Thursday morning before a vote.

The result of that was that any ­amendments had to have been circulated by 9.50am. The Palmer revisions missed the deadline.

Chaos, not conspiracy

The Coalition desperately tried to find a way of clearing the matter up, creating the bizarre spectre of a government ­filibustering during its own guillotined debate as it worked behind the scenes to try to find a compromise that would give the prime minister the carbon price victory he wanted.

It didn’t work. Palmer felt he had been misled by the government. Abetz was overheard accusing Palmer of breaking his word in a huddle outside the Senate chamber. The PUPs decided to vote down the repeal bill until they had their amendment.

To presume that everything that followed was therefore a deliberate attempt to bomb the government is a big call.

Having said that, the Palmer amendment still hangs over the Senate, and the business community, in a most threatening fashion.

Even a layperson’s reading of it shows a very confused bit of proposed legislation.

Some of it appears to apply to the entire business sector to meet onerous reporting requirements. Some of it seems only designed to affect the energy sector.

Palmer has repeatedly talked about it only applying to the energy sector – a point he made again to The AustralianFinancial Review on Friday – while PUP Senator Dio Wang insisted it apply to any business that supplied goods or services to consumers.

The inconsistencies in the amendments would normally suggest the whole thing may have to be significantly reworked, once the PUP’s position has been nailed down. The suspicions of a new political party and new senators – exacerbated by this week’s events – may make that process more complicated than many are presuming.

But it is fascinating to consider that a government that has pledged less red tape was prepared to back this amendment.

Palmer is a smart politician and thrives on throwing bombs.

Overlooked in the drama of Thursday is the fact that the PUP has helped add $10 billion to the budget ­bottom line by insisting some of the ­spending measures attached to the mining tax be retained.

But not everything that happened this week was a result of deliberate disruption.

Palmer clearly revels in letting off a shot at the Coalition where he can.

But in the dramas of this week, no one is suggesting he will stop the government repealing the mining and carbon tax.He is a loose cannon rather than a Catherine wheel that has jumped the nail on the fence on cracker night.

Nor does he necessarily control his senators. The need for the government to start doing some serious work in bringing them into the tent, and the capacity for that to work for everyone, is great.

For all its talk of how it knew exactly what to do to deal with the new Senate, it has not been a good start by the government.

And there remains the broader point of whether the unpredictable nature of the numbers – not just the PUPs but the combinations of other crossbenches – will require a more general change in modus operandi by Abbott.